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When Morgan Rielly missed most of his second season of junior hockey rehabbing from knee surgery, he also missed the bleary-eyed loop of bus trips through the prairie winter.

But that didn’t keep Rielly from waiting at the bus stop. While his Moose Jaw Warrior teammates would be rolling home through the snow, Rielly made a habit of waking to his alarm in the wee hours. He’d pull on a parka over his flannel pyjamas. He would drive to the rink around the time the team was set to arrive. Once there, he’d happily help unload equipment and chat with pals.

Never mind that it was the middle of the night, or that he was months away from strapping on skates. The best player on the squad just wanted to be part of the group.

“You’ve got to love a kid who’d do that,” Mike Stothers, the Moose Jaw coach and ex-Leaf defenceman, was saying this week. “It meant a lot to the guys.”

Two games into what may or may not be his first season with the Maple Leafs, Rielly has yet to play a shift. But the slick-skating defenceman, drafted fifth overall by Toronto in 2012, has been enthusiastically making himself part of the group. He has marvelled at the amenities at the team’s practice facilities — “All the coconut water you can drink,” he said with a giddy laugh a while back. He has gushed about the A-1 catering on the team’s charter jet: “All that food ...” The other day in Montreal he engaged in a competitive two-man workout with David Clarkson, Toronto’s other non-playing roster fixture of the moment.

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With Thursday’s news that Leafs defenceman Mark Fraser has been placed on injured reserved with a sore knee, Rielly is expected to draw into the lineup in Saturday night’s home opener against the Ottawa Senators.

“He’s very close to playing,” Dave Poulin, Toronto’s vice-president of hockey operations, said on Thursday. “If and when he’s given an opportunity, he’ll make the most of it.”

While the Leafs are off to a 2-0 start, they’ve hardly been flawless on the back end. Strong goaltending has patched more than a few cracks in the defensive corps, and it’s no secret that Maple Leafs management is more than a little high on the idea of the highly skilled kid from Vancouver getting ice time.

“Morgan Rielly has looked to me like he’s come in here and ready to take a job,” Leafs GM Dave Nonis told a gathering of the team’s season-ticket holders last week. “I don’t have a problem keeping a 19-year-old player here, none whatsoever.”

Still, as bullish as Nonis has sounded, the GM has vowed that experience-favouring head coach Randy Carlyle will make the final decision on player selection.

“Randy has to be comfortable that (Rielly is) going to play, maybe not every night, but a lot of the nights, and he’s going to play 12, 15 minutes a night,” Nonis said in the meeting with subscribers last week. “That’s something we feel is going to happen.

The Leafs can get a look at Rielly for a maximum of nine NHL games without triggering the first year of his entry-level contract. Beyond that, their only option would be to send him back to Moose Jaw to play his fourth season in the WHL. The either-or scenario raises an obvious question, to wit: Wouldn’t it be best for Rielly’s development if there was a third alternative — specifically, a chance to play with the American Hockey League’s Toronto Marlies. Alas, that choice is currently prohibited by an agreement between the NHL and the Canadian Hockey League.

“Would it be nice to have another option? Of course it would,” said Poulin. “In a perfect world, if a 19-year-old had already played three years of major junior (as Rielly has), would it be nice to have the option of the American Hockey League on an earned individual basis? Of course.”

Poulin, in the same breath, acknowledges that scenario would pose an immediate problem for owners of junior franchises.

“I understand the CHL doesn’t want to lose its star players. That’s really what it is,” Poulin said. “But maybe on a limited basis you would have an option to do that with a player.”

David Branch, the president of the CHL, said he’s of the belief that the current system serves both his owners and their players.

“If you’re exceptional, you play in the NHL. If not, you return to junior hockey,” Branch said. “As more and more junior age players play in the NHL, hockey people certainly recognize the importance of not skimming off the next layer of talent to put them in minor professional settings.”

Branch and Stothers rejected the idea that heading back to junior would do harm to Rielly’s progress.

“There’s nothing to say that he won’t be as good (playing this season in junior) as he would have been if he’d gone to the AHL. You might even argue he could be better,” Branch said. “The risk of serious injury as a 19-year-old playing against grown men in the American Hockey League is significantly greater. There’s a lot of what ifs and wherefores.”

Rielly, mind you, played 18 regular-season games and eight playoff matches in the AHL last season — this after Moose Jaw’s campaign concluded with the Warriors out of the playoffs. Rielly looked, in Poulin’s estimation, “very comfortable.”

Said Rielly during training camp: “If I go back to junior I’m going to keep working hard, keep trying to get better. Obviously my goal is to play here in Toronto this year. But I’ll be happy either way.”

He’ll be happy even if he’s not being ideally served by a system Poulin called “imperfect.”

Said Poulin: “You don’t dwell on something you can’t have. But are there conversations about (tweaking the system)? Yes.”

Stothers, for his part, said he would clearly welcome Rielly back in Moose Jaw should the Leafs decide that’s what’s best for him. But the Warriors coach, who played 18 games on defence for his hometown Maple Leafs back in the late-1980s, sounded as though he wouldn’t be surprised if Rielly never again rode a bus with a team of fellow teenagers.

“He’s an awesome kid, an absolute gem,” Stothers said. “The thing with Morgs is, the more you hang around him, the more you want to hang around him. That’s actually my fear. The longer he’s there, the more the Leafs are going to learn to love him.”

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